Fawk Your Walls
By Brian Amadi
Eastern Edge Gallery, July 19 – August 31, 2024
Reviewed by Sharon Bala
One of the highlights of Brian Amadi’s first solo exhibition, Fawk Your Walls, currently on view at the Eastern Edge’s rOGUE Gallery, is near the entrance. It is a portrait of the American rapper and record producer J. Cole, faithfully rendered, right down to the slight under-eye bags, and cheekily kitted out in the accoutrements of Christ.
J.C. has dreads, held off his forehead with a paisley bandana. One hand gestures to the sacred heart, ringed with thorns; the other is raised in the familiar two-fingered blessing. It would be easy to dismiss the work as sacrilege or stunt, but the eyes are too arresting and empathetic to be insincere.
Its counterpoint — the exhibition’s other stand-out — hangs at the gallery’s far end. A Black man, young and strong, posed in a figura serpentinata with his back to the viewer and his face in profile, is draped in an American flag that’s been set alight, flames engulfing the bottom of the frame, dark smoke billowing off the top.
Intentionally arresting, purposely provocative, these two paintings, which could form a diptych, force the viewer to consider humanity and who is afforded its privilege.
Amadi’s medium is acrylics. His canvas is denim. Jean jackets, their backs vividly painted, are strung up, as if on a laundry line. This choice of materials, he writes in his artist’s statement, is a nod to the rising demand for mobile and functional art.
Fawk Your Walls is intended as a statement against the economic pressures that hold young people in a vice, and specifically the near-impossibility of homeownership for those under 40. If you can’t afford to own four walls, you wear your art on your back.
Amadi’s work isn’t just political. It is also fantastically gorgeous, demonstrating enormous skill and attention to detail. Notice a dot of light in a pupil, the shading along a jaw, the life and love lines along the side of a palm. No doubt these pieces were meticulously, painstakingly completed. Yet they have that enviable quality of appearing effortless.
And several are quite fun! A series of feminine figures represent the zodiac, each with an astrological sign in the middle of her forehead like a bindi. Virgo has flowers in her hair. Aries sports ram’s horns. Taurus wears a gold nose chain — traditionally associated, at least in Hindu culture, with the wedding night — and lasciviously licks the ruby nail of a pinky finger. There is a levity to these depictions that speaks to the artist’s range.
The way Amadi’s exhibition is hung — clipped to a line or draped on wooden pallets, leaving the walls untouched — nods at rental prohibitions against painting and nails. The art’s portability, how quickly it can all be pulled down, shoved into a duffel, and carried away, is evocative of transience, and especially poignant in the wake of the recent destruction of the community encampment at Bannerman Park.
But, though the paintings themselves are accomplished and admirable, none seem to comment on, or even gesture at, the housing crisis. Instead of cohering around a central theme, with each piece piping in on the shared conversation, they compete for attention, chattering about disparate subjects.
Standing at the exhibition’s entrance, the view partially obscured by a transparent curtain, gives the feeling of being a voyeur, glimpsing strangers through a window. And once inside, lingering at each canvas to admire Amadi’s expertise and precision, is a little like meeting the motley, endlessly fascinating, residents of a co-op. Fawk Your Walls will be at its temporary home in the rOGUE Gallery through August 31, 2024.
Sharon Bala’s best-selling debut novel, The Boat People, won the 2020 Newfoundland & Labrador Book Award and the 2019 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, was short-listed for several awards, and is in translation in four languages. Sharon is a member of The Port Authority writing group.
August, 2024